The 2013 Lampedusa Migrant Boat in British, German and French Newspaper Accounts
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The European Union under Pressure Public Narratives on Europe and its Borders: The 2013 Lampedusa Migrant Boat in British, German and French Newspaper Accounts Larissa Fleischmann Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology University of Konstanz [email protected] Tel.: (+49) (0)7531-88-5629 This paper was submitted in September 2014 as part fulfilment of the regulations for the Master of Research in Human Geography in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow and supervised by Prof. J. Sharp. Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-0-306726 Acknowledgements I would like to offer my thanks to Prof. Joanne Sharp for her supervision throughout this project. Her gainful advice and direction has importantly contributed to the progress of my work. Also, I would like to thank Prof. Hayden Lorimer who has been a very helpful and supportive course convenor throughout the past year. 1 Abstract This project aims to explore understandings of ‘Europe’ and its borders in public discourses in Britain, Germany and France. Thereby, it tries to shed light on Europe’s assumed ‘identity crisis’: scholars have argued that the European Union (EU) is unable to yarn a common thread of European identity among its putative citizens. In order to investigate these public understandings of Europe, the empirical analysis aims to examine newspaper accounts on the migrant boat which sank near the Italian island of Lampedusa on the 3rd October 2013. It is estimated that more than 300 migrants, mostly believed to be Eritrean, died in the Mediterranean Sea in their attempt to claim asylum in the EU. The shipwreck triggered an important media debate on the European border and asylum policies in its aftermath. The thesis will show that these media representations are important for the study of ‘Europe’: they are “key to understanding the ways in which people understand the world around them and their place within it” as Sharp (2011, 298) has noted. A total number of 109 articles, directly relating to the Lampedusa shipwreck in the newspapers The Guardian (Britain), Der Spiegel (Germany) and Le Monde (France), have been compiled, coded and analysed. As I will outline in Chapter 4, each of the analysed newspapers ascribes different meanings to the event and thus articulates different understandings of Europe. These findings parallel with the argument that “’Europe’ figures as a differentially articulated concept, vision and project within self-defining national narratives” as Moisio et al. (2013, 744) have noted. I will argue that ‘Europe’ should therefore be understood as a “traveling idea” (Said: 1983) that changes as it traverses from one location or point in time to another since it adapts to the new historical and social context. All of three analysed ‘ideas’ of Europe, however, are highly critical of the European border and asylum policies. The European Union is therefore increasingly under public pressure. These findings indicate that academic works on the current European border-making are unable to explain the articulated ‘ideas’ of Europe. By arguing that Europe re-asserts a postcolonial identity (see van Houtum: 2010) or is possessed by a ‘globalized fear’ (Pain: 2009) they draw a rather deterministic and essentialized picture of ‘Europe’. By doing so, they fail to make sense of Europe’s inner differences and negotiation processes and draw an overly pessimistic and critical picture of ‘Fortress Europe’ – in effect, they overlook possible starting points for future changes and discursive dislocations. 2 Content i. Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 1 ii. Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 2 iii. Content ........................................................................................................................... 3 iv. List of Figures and Tables.............................................................................................. 5 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 7 2. The Theoretical Framework: Europe’s multiple Borders and Public Discourses ....................................................................................................... 10 2.1 Borders around Europe: Constructing European Identity through the Encounter with the ‘Other‘ ............................................................................................. 10 2.1.1 Europe and a Postcolonial Identity ........................................................................... 11 2.1.2 Europe and a ‘Globalized Fear‘ ................................................................................ 13 2.2 Borders within Europe: Constructing European Identity through the Nation-State ...................................................................................................................... 15 2.3 Public Discourses on Europe and its Borders ......................................................... 17 2.3.1 The Media and Public Discourses............................................................................. 17 2.3.2 A Contextual Framework for the Analysis of Geopolitical Storylines in Media Articles .................................................................................................................... 18 3. Methodological Considerations: Analysing Newspaper Articles and their ‘Worldliness‘ ............................................................................................ 23 4. The Empirical Analysis: Geopolitical Storylines on the 2013 Lampedusa Shipwreck in Britain, Germany and France ................. 27 4.1 Britain’s Abstention: The Geopolitical Storyline in The Guardian ...................... 27 4.1.1 The ‘Worldly‘ Context of Production ....................................................................... 27 4.1.2 The Geopolitical Storyline on the Lampedusa Shipwreck ....................................... 29 3 4.2 Germany’s Guilt: The Geopolitical Storyline in Der Spiegel ................................ 35 4.2.1 The ‘Worldly‘ Context of Production ....................................................................... 35 4.2.2 The Geopolitical Storyline on the Lampedusa Shipwreck ....................................... 37 4.3 France‘s Engagement with Africa: The Geopolitical Storyline in Le Monde ...... 43 4.3.2 The ‘Worldly‘ Context of Production ....................................................................... 43 4.3.2 The Geopolitical Storyline on the Lampedusa Shipwreck ....................................... 45 4.4 Synthesis: Europe as a ‘Traveling Idea‘ .................................................................. 52 5. Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 56 v. Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 58 vi. Index of Analysed Newspaper Articles ....................................................................... 65 vii. Appendix: Coded Meanings of the Articles on the Lampedusa Shipwreck ................ 81 4 List of Figures and Tables TITEL PAGE: “Migrants arriving on the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011” The Guardian (03/10/2013b) FIGURE 1: Refurbishing the old image of princess Europa? ............................ 16 (Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Jupiter_in_the_shape_of_a_bull_carrying_off_Europa_by_ Francesco_Albani.jpg [last accessed: 25/08/2012]) FIGURE 2: A framework for the analysis of practical geopolitical reasoning ........................................................................ 23 (O Tuathail: 2002, 608) FIGURE 3: The ‘grammar of geopolitics’ ............................................................ 24 (O Tuathail: 2002, 609) FIGURE 4: The notion of a ‘tragedy’ ................................................................... 36 The Guardian (10/10/2013a) FIGURE 5: The image of the innocent and helpless migrant ............................. 36 The Guardian (13/10/2013b) FIGURE 6: “Migrants dock at Lampedusa...13,000 have arrived there so far this year” ....................................................................... 38 The Guardian (16/10/2013) FIGURE 7: Critique at the ‘Fiction of Fortress Europe’.................................... 42 Der Spiegel (07/10/2013c) FIGURE 8: “Asylum protest at the Brandenburg Gate: Debate on the reception of more refugees” .............................................................. 44 Der Spiegel (10/10/2013b) FIGURE 9: “Dumb witnesses of an unbelievable tragedy” ................................ 45 Der Spiegel (07/10/2013b) FIGURE 10: The Mediterranean Sea as the intersection of Africa and Europe.............................................................................. 51 Le Monde (05/10/2013, 3) (Print Version) FIGURE 11: Blurring the binary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ .................................. 52 Le Monde (08/10/2013) (Accessible online at: http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/portfolio/2013/10/08/a-lampedusa-les- rescapes-trompent-l-attente-en-ville_3491851_3214.html? xtmc=lampedusa&xtcr=117) 5 FIGURE 12: “The Third World!” (Le Tiers-Monde!) ......................................... 53 Le Monde (10/10/2013, 1) (Print Version) TABLE 1: The Analysed Geopolitical